Maisie Williams, the 16-year-old Game of Thrones actress, says she has stopped
seeing a tutor as she wants to focus on acting.

After Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, left school in favour of a private tutor as she didn’t like being 'talked down to’, her on-screen sister Maisie Williams has now stopped education entirely.

The 16-year-old actress, who plays Arya Stark in the series, has finished with tutors. “I stopped school two years ago,” she tells Mandrake at a party in Mayfair. “I had a tutor instead but now I’m 16 so I’ve stopped that too.” She plans to focus on acting, as she can always return to education later. “I can always go back. I’m enjoying Game of Thrones right now,” she says. “I don’t know what happens to my character in the end as I haven’t read the books.”

Word games

Lord Frederick Windsor won his wife Sophie Winkleman’s hand in marriage by writing out the proposal on a Scrabble board after the pair bonded over their love of crosswords and word puzzles.

Now, the 33-year-old Peep Show actress is mourning the loss of the first man who won her heart through such games. Mandrake can disclose that Winkleman has returned from her home in America early for Christmas to say a final farewell to the acclaimed crossword setter the Rev John Graham.

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“I actually flew over earlier than I planned so I could see my friend who was ill, John Graham, the crossword setter” she tells Mandrake at English National Ballet’s annual Christmas party at the St Martins Lane hotel. “So I came over late November and saw him before he died which was very wonderful.” Winkleman became close friends with the leading crossword setter, who went by the pseudonym Araucaria, when she got in touch with him over a puzzle.

“He was my beloved friend because I wrote him a fan letter about 10 years ago about one of his crosswords,” she says. “We’ve been very dear friends ever since.”

Graham died on November 26 at the age of 92 after being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2012.

He revealed the news of his diagnosis in the solutions to a puzzle for 1 Across, the crossword magazine.

It included a set of instructions: “Araucaria,” it said, “has 18 down of the 19”. Those who solved the puzzle found the answer to 18 was cancer, and to 19 oesophagus.

Cut above the rest

After she was branded 'too ugly for television’ by critics, Mary Beard promised she would never undergo a makeover or change to fit in.

Still, the professor of classics at Cambridge University is finding it hard to keep to her words entirely. “I am absolutely determined to have something kooky done, like dye my hair pink,” the Meet the Romans presenter tells Mandrake. “I think I am going to keep my hair long though, as if I cut it everyone would be like, 'She’s cut her hair, she’s given in to the critics’.”

Beard now has a dutiful audience judging her sartorial choices daily. “My students notice what I’m wearing now and they tweet about it,” she says. “They say, 'Oh she’s wearing her high tops today’.”

Mistaken identity

As American Psycho opens in the West End this week it appears that the trend of adapting films for the theatre shows no sign of waning.

David Baddiel tells me he is hoping to turn his film The Infidel into a musical in the new year. “I am adapting The Infidel into a musical,” he says. “It’s in the early stages but it should be good.”

The original film stars the comedian Omid Djalili and tells the story of a British Muslim who goes through an identity crisis after discovering he was adopted as a child and born to a Jewish family. Other films adapted for the West End include From Here to Eternity and Dirty Dancing.